


hold you tight to me

by annesbonny



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 5 times zuko hugged azula and one time she hugged him, 5+1 Things, Background Jin/Azula, Comfort, Gen, Hugs, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Canon, Siblings, background sokka/zuko - Freeform, it's mainly about the sibling relationship here guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:27:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28653483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annesbonny/pseuds/annesbonny
Summary: “It’s just,” he frowns, “Something the healer said.”“Oh, what did your brain healer tell you this time?” she tries to sneer, as if she isn’t also seeing one. One who keeps reminding her there’s no shame in it. In being hurt. She looks at her brother, curious despite her derision.“That it’s what people who love you do. They put their arms around you, and they hug you, and they let you know you’re loved.”… Oh.[Or, 5 times Zuko hugged Azula, and one time she hugged him.]
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 192





	hold you tight to me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [egeria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/egeria/gifts).



> For Connie <3 with thanks to Em, Chelsea, and other discord folks <3
> 
> Title from By Your Side by Sade

The first hug happens a year after the war is over. Still too long, according to her brother, when she asks him later. But Azula’s brother has always been too soft. 

She goes tense under his grip, her own arms stuck to her side as his arms wrap around her, pulling her close. 

“Zuko? What do you think you’re doing?”

“Hugging you.” 

“Yes, I can see that,” she frowns a little as he still doesn’t let go. “Why?”

He pushes back slightly. Holding her by the shoulders. Azula used to say he got their father’s look, his height, but she got all his cunning. She’s trying not to think things like that anymore. Their father was- wasn’t good to them. Still, the thought won’t quite go away as she looks up at him, a full foot taller than her, holding her like father never did. 

Like family was supposed to. 

“It’s just,” he frowns, “Something the healer said.”

“Oh, what did your brain healer tell you this time?” she tries to sneer, as if she isn’t also seeing one. One who keeps reminding her there’s no shame in it. In being hurt. She looks at her brother, curious despite her derision. 

“That it’s what people who love you _do._ They put their arms around you, and they hug you, and they let you know you’re loved.”

… Oh. 

There are more hugs, in the years before she turns 18. More hugs, more healer appointments, less pain. And when Azula’s birthday finally comes around, her friends, her brother, the people who apparently _love_ her want to celebrate with her. For some reason. 

She still doesn’t really understand it yet, but she’s been trying to. 

Her spine doesn't stiffen and her shoulders don't tense when Zuko's arms go around her. She feels... safe. 

When he pulls back, she even smiles. 

Real smiles now. Not like what she used to do. 

"You better have gotten me a better present than a hug, Zuzu. It won't do for the Firelord to go cheap on his own sister's birthday." 

Zuko rolls his eyes, and a smile plays at his own lips. "Of course not, Azula." He reaches into his robe, pulling out a small package. Carefully wrapped in golden silk and ribbons. 

She takes it from him with curious fingers, turning it over in her hands for a moment. It feels like a book, but she knows her brother would never get her something so dreadfully boring as a book. She’s not him. Azula has never cared for plays and flights of fancy like him. She wasn't the one donning theatre masks to commit treason like some kind of _idiot._

She pulls the red ribbons aside, and the silk falls away. 

It _is_ a book, but not like she expected. It’s not his old copy of _Love Amongst the Dragons_ or something equally insipid. The pages are old, but the binding is new, she realises, turning it in her hands. 

Her brow furrows. 

She opens the book. 

A beat. 

“Zuko, are these…?”

“They were in our old nursery in the Ember Island house. I suppose… no one ever thought to get rid of them.”

There are several drawings, children’s drawings, pressed lovingly between an intricate leather binding with what feels to Azula like an unfathomable amount of care. 

She doesn’t remember making them, exactly, although they’re undoubtedly hers. With a few of Zuko’s additions from when they cooperated. Before they stopped cooperating. She doesn’t remember drawing them, it was that long ago, but she remembers when she _stopped._ Remembers her father telling her that little girls who wanted to be crown princesses didn’t get to do things like that. Didn’t get to have fun. 

She had no idea that that version of herself, carefree and pressed into lovingly rendered scribbles, still existed. 

And Zuko had loved her enough to find her. 

“Do you like it?”

Azula’s gaze flickers back up, to her brother’s nervous face. Chin jutted out just slightly as he waits for her approval. 

“It’s… adequate,” she says. Zuko knows her well enough now, to understand that that’s Azula for she loves it. And she loves him too. 

He pulls her into another hug. 

“Sokka helped,” he says into her hair, “He’s getting into bookbinding, apparently. He’s trying to invent some kind of pressing machine to help him?”

When she pulls back, Azula watches as her brother’s eyes track fondly to the Water Tribe Ambassador. After a moment, Sokka seems to feel the gaze, because he looks over, smiles at them, and waves with far too much enthusiasm. Too much. Enough that he knocks Katara’s drink all over her, and immediately starts getting an earful. 

Zuko laughs. 

Oh no. No. She’s absolutely going to have to do something about this.

It takes four years, and a spectacularly inventive plot to trick her brother into going on a date with Sokka, because Spirits only know he was too much of a dumb dumb to just ask the object of his affections out, before she finally watches as they get married.

"Let go of me this second," she scowls into her brother's chest. The sound of Sokka's laughter is muffled by the formal robes that are swamping all three of them. 

"Not a chance," her brother-in-law says from somewhere behind her. His tone absolutely bursting with mirth, that she couldn't imagine him having levelled her way ten years ago. "It's so lovely to have another little sister."

She's starting to regret not vanishing into the woods and living just to cause problems for her Fire Lord brother and his _stupid_ husband.

"Brother," she snarls, "Make him let go of us or I'm setting his sleeve on fire."

It's more warning than she'd have given him even five years ago.

Zuko laughs, pulling back to break the three person hug first. He smiles so widely at Sokka, and Sokka smiles back, it's sickening. "Do you think you could give us a moment?"

"Anything for you, sunshine."

Beside Zuko, Azula gags.

Zuko catches it as he turns and, much to her surprise, lets out an undignified snort of laughter. "I thought you liked Sokka now?"

"I said he'd _do,"_ Azula rolls her eyes, "Besides, it's not like _my_ opinion matters. You've already married him."

There are blue beads threaded through her brother's hair, and a Silver Crown through Sokka's wolftail. It is done, whether or not _she_ cares either way _._ Yes she may technically have set them up but she hadn't expected them to be quite so disgustingly in love. 

Once again, she had miscalculated.

Her brow knits into a confused line as she looks shrewdly across at her brother. There's only one question that matters, in the end. "Does he make you happy?"

Zuko pauses, eyes wandering after Sokka as he strides through the banquet hall. Robes of midnight blue flowing around him. Zuko nods. "Immeasurably."

"Then I'm… _happy for you."_ The words still aren't as easy for her as they seem to be for other people. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps she has to make her peace with that. 

But if the Water Tribe Idiot makes her brother happy, she supposes she can be happy for him.

He's done so much for her, after all. 

She tells herself this is why her arms wrap around him in return almost instantaneously when he pulls her into the next hug. They don't say anything, but how can they?

The words don't come easily to either of them, perhaps, but this _has_ gotten easier. Allowing her brother to hold her close - like a _normal_ brother, one who she had never tried to kill- became a way to say _I love you_ at some point over the past decade. 

Finally she retracts her arms from around his middle and looks up at him.

“Thank you, Azula,” he says, and then offers her his arm to take a turn about the banquet hall, stopping to greet people as they go. Until finally, they meet a woman who Azula has never seen before. She’s pretty, and she greets Zuko with the warmth of friendship that has to come from years of knowing each other, which is strange. 

It seems to take a moment for Zuko to realise he still hasn’t introduced them.

"Oh, forgive me, this is my sister Azula," Zuko says, still smiling at the woman in front of them, before he turns his gaze to Azula. There’s a hint of mischief in his eyes. "This is Jin."

“I said leave me _alone,_ Zuzu.” She hisses his nickname with more venom than she’s put behind it in years. The acid practically drips from her tongue as she storms away from him. Her stupid brother has never really been one to leave well enough alone. So, naturally, he follows her through open doors of the palace and out into the courtyard. 

Blue flames are sparking at her fingertips and she fights to get them under control. Her uncle’s voice sounds unhelpfully in her head, reminding her to _breathe._ He’s been making an effort too, just not nearly as successfully as Zuko. She’s not sure why it is easier to forgive her brother, as her brother forgives her, but it _is._

As their arguments go, this was hardly the most calamitous. They did once set the entire outer palace courtyard on fire and both end up in the infirmary for over a week, after all. 

It is not _easy_ to forgive herself. To understand herself. To confront everything that is wrong. It is not easy to look her brother in the face and know she hurt him. Their past is full of pitfalls and scars and neither of them can overlook them. Old habits die hard and it does not take much to start screaming at each other, even if they don’t want to _do_ that anymore. They don’t _have_ to do that anymore. 

Their father is gone. 

He is out of their lives entirely. 

But sometimes snapping at her brother on the end of a rough appointment with her healers is easier than licking her own wounds. She has never relinquished the knowledge of how to press his buttons and it’s too easy to pull a rise from him, trick him into saying words that he doesn’t mean either. 

Starting a yelling match with her brother feels like a step backwards, but only if she allows herself to view it as such. Really, it only proves the healers’ ridiculously unhelpful - albeit truthful - point about healing being non-linear. 

Still, the reminder from her own brain to breathe causes her to suck in a breath, ignore the hairs of her bangs that have fallen out of place, and come to a stop so suddenly that Zuko almost walks straight into her.

For a second, as she turns, she thinks he’s going to start yelling again. In that second he looks so dreadfully, awfully like their mother. She sucks in a breath, preparing to yell back, but he does the most unexpected thing, and it knocks the wind right out of her. 

He pulls her into a hug.

Azula goes still in his arms. 

Her voice comes out a whisper rather than a yell. “Why are you _hugging_ me?”

“Because I’m sorry.” 

“... Oh.” Then, “I’m sorry too.” 

Azula doesn’t return the hug, but neither does she push him off. They stand, for a while, and neither says anything. It is a comfort, to be held, even in the face of her anger, at herself and her failures. It makes it feel less like failure. 

More like things will be okay, in the end.

Azula hasn't scowled all day. She wants to, sometimes, and she knows Jin can tell from the way that she squeezes her hand every time one of Zuko's ministers simpers and bows and says something just along the line between compliment and insult. It's her _wedding day._ She's not about to let anyone ruin it.

The first reprieve they really get is when Zuko comes over to congratulate them again, Sokka on his arm, because no one will dare interrupt _both_ of the Royal siblings when they're talking together.

"I love weddings," Sokka sighs, voice wistful as he looks over the two of them. "The _love,_ the drinks… the food."

Jin raises an eyebrow. "Didn't you knock over the entire banquet table at your sister's wedding?"

"It was _one_ tray knocked to the floor and it was entirely Zuko's fault."

"That's not how I heard it," Jin laughs, "the way Azula tells it-"

"Well, Azula's always lying," Sokka pouts and Azula snorts - actually snorts - with laughter. The three of them all look at her in surprise as she recovers her composure but it is Zuko who catches himself first.

"Could you fetch me some of that plum wine, darling?" Zuko asks, smiling beatifically at his husband. "Maybe Jin can make sure you don't destroy any valuable displays of food on your way?"

Her brother has never exactly been subtle, Azula notes, as her wife and her brother-in-law walk away together arm-in-arm and in search of refreshments.

Zuko's still smiling, and at _her_ now. Soft and _brotherly_ and it's too sweet. Sweet enough to make her nose scrunch as she fights the almost overwhelming urge to scowl at him.

"What? What do you _want?_ " she hisses, "Stop looking at me like that."

"I can't be happy for my sister on her wedding day?" He challenges, but she refuses to give him her first scowl of the day.

“I’ll allow it,” she sniffs, “As long as you don’t--”

Her request is stopped as he puts his arms around her, and she is grudgingly forced to accept the display of affection. She supposes, as she returns it, on her wedding day she will allow him this much. 

It's twenty years to the day. Azula's rarely in the palace anymore, her and Jin have their own life thank you very much. But it's twenty years to the day, and she's back in the palace.

She paces past the Agni Kai chamber.

It mostly collects dust. She knows that. No one has dared challenge Zuko in years. Why would they? _He's_ a good and just Fire Lord. _He_ doesn't scar children. Princess Izumi will grow up safe and happy and perhaps most importantly _knowing_ she is loved. 

Just like she and Zuko deserved to.

The concept of that took a while for her to grasp.

Years of healing, and understanding and apologising. Accepting that some people would never forgive the person she once was.

She struggled sometimes to understand how Zuko had forgiven the little girl who had laughed when he got his scar.

She struggled to see how she deserved him.

But the years had shown both of them it was not necessarily about what they deserved. 

Zuko is found with his daughter in the courtyard garden. Kneeling beside Izumi as she throws crumbs to the turtleducks. It’s such a familiar scene that Azula’s heart would _ache_ if it did things like that. But it doesn’t. What it does is allow her to move silently into the garden, on the edge of Zuko’s notice as he smiles fondly at his daughter, right up until the moment Azula is wrapping her arms around his neck and shoulders from behind, leaning down to give him a tight hug. 

Years ago the action would have had him tensing under her grasp, anticipating the attack, but as she rested her head on his shoulder all she got was his confused sigh. 

"Azula?" 

"You're a good brother," she says, so quietly he almost doesn't hear her. His hands come to rest over her forearms where they are around his neck as he leans back into the hug. 

He doesn't seem able to say anything, but she doesn't need him to.

She just needs him to let her hold her brother, so he knows he is loved.


End file.
